


you and all your vibrant youth

by mutterandmumble



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Akaashi is extremely dramatic and so am I, Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Crush at First Sight, First Meetings, Implied/Referenced Anxiety, Loneliness, M/M, No Dialogue, Prose poetry more than anything, Social Anxiety, Trains, crowds, vague vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 06:36:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19883242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: He is bobbing his head lightly, tapping his foot to the beat, is sitting like he feels completely safe, and Akaashi isfascinated. Thoroughly, wholly, from the tips of his fingers to his dull gray clothing. He is, in all of his dreary, undersaturated glory, being lent color to his cheeks and a steady beat to his heart, a flurry in his stomach and a stutter between his lungs; he feels like he does when he is nervous, like he is sparking some fuse that sets light to his whole being. Like he is funneling himself through a pulsing mass of doubt and confidence, jumping from one high to three lows and then back again until he’s all jumbled up and three seconds from bursting into tears.——-In which there is a train and a meeting





	you and all your vibrant youth

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Hunger by Florence and the Machine
> 
> Warnings: implied/referenced anxiety, social anxiety, description of crowds
> 
> You guys know those crushes you get for like ten minutes while on the subway, or in line at the grocery store? Yep that’s this. And when I say that this is dramatic, I _absolutely_ mean it. It’s like bordering on a joke while at the same time being very serious. But I had a blast writing it, because unnecessary, overwrought, largely unrealistic emotional imagery is just so much _fun_ and right in my comfort zone.

Akaashi stumbles to the station at the end of the day bleary-eyed and world-weary, testing his own weight on his shoulders; and they hunch (as they ought to), and his spine curves (along its vertebrae, one-by-one), and his fingers wring together like puzzle pieces in front of his chest. The sun beats down from above until it soaks into his clothing, leaving it damp and heavy and dripping from his sides, pasted to his skin along the curves of his arms. It makes his blood boil.

The station is crowded, as it is in the evenings, and packed from wall-to-wall with televisions blaring ads and the hollow, clanging sound of oncoming trains. Akaashi shifts, moving his bag from where it’s lying across his body until it hangs right on the edge of one of his shoulders instead- he still feels the ghost of its weight on his chest, pressing against his ribs. He is feeling very brittle today, worn through and out; he is standing alone beneath the ground, and his skin is going gray from lack of light. His hair is a dark mass that slips over his forehead and creeps down and around his ears. His eyes are  _ black _ set in  _ gray _ wrapped in  _ white _ .

Those around him talk on, and Akaashi feels himself melting into the dirty tile that lines the floor. It’s been a long, long day. It has been years upon decades upon centuries since he first woke that morning, and in that time he’s aged an immeasurable amount; the cuffs of his sleeve are choking his gnarled old wrists, and he thinks that by now he must be  _ very  _ old and gray, very washed-out out and through. He tugs his collar away from his neck and revels in the three seconds of easy breathing that small movement gives him. He’s been stretched beyond his limits by now, pushed and coaxed into some uncomfortable in-between where he is far too tired to be seen and yet still out in the open, easy and able to be approached. He is still undeniably  _ there _ , try as he might to disappear. 

He is very, very tired. It is very, very crowded, very, very loud. Akaashi is all alone today, and he will remain as such until he gets home to his roommates; but until then he is abandoned in this sea of people, left to drift silent through his own thoughts with his arms tucked close to his sides and his legs curled beneath him. His train should be arriving soon, he knows, because he’s been doing this for the better part of the year- since he started college, in fact, and became accustomed to new ways of thinking and feeling and perceiving. Narrow and uncomfortable ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving, but new ways nonetheless!

He sighs softly and shifts his weight from foot to foot until he’s swaying like a stalk in the wind. Any minute now, he can go home. Any minute now.

Distantly, he notices that are many, many people standing in a loose circle right next to him; they are in one big group, and they are all wearing bright colors, and they are all laughing very, very loudly. Akaashi watches them with the sort of calcified interest that he’s pushed down for years and years, and he wonders what  _ that _ would be like. To laugh, uninhibited and loud where anyone can hear him, to stand hunched over onto another’s shoulders and wind his arms around their torso, their waist, to make inside jokes that have his friends unraveling into giggles and snorts and wheezes- to find the sort of easy comfort in the cadence of another’s voice as he finds in the rocking on his heels. To feel as the boy nearest to him does when he throws his head back, covering his mouth with his hand and blooming in watercolor-bursts of red and yellow and green. Akaashi wonders what that would be like.

Then he figures that  _ that  _ sort of thinking never did anyone good and sends the odd sensation that’s been creeping up his throat rolling off his back. And he keeps himself steady, and he checks the time again. His train has not been late for six months and counting; it will not be late today, and it will not be late tomorrow, and for as long as he is present on  _ this _ platform and adhering to  _ this  _ schedule, it will not be late. And because Akaashi knows that his train will not be late, and he is intimately acquainted with its comings and goings, he knows that it must be approaching by now. So he steps forwards in preparation, shouldering through the crowds and taking care to keep himself situated behind the yellow line. Then right on time, from the tracks, there is a clatter. 

Ten seconds later find the train screeching to a halt at the platform. The people around him gather up and surge forwards, talking amongst themselves as they struggle through the doors and disperse among the seats, the sides. Akaashi flows right along with them, dissolving into the stream and letting himself be carried along with the rhythm that they set, making himself incomprehensible through their movement and their murmurs. His legs carry him forwards to the seat right near the doors, which is (mercifully) still open; he settles fast, placing his bag on his lap and keeping his head low as he prepares for the long ride home. He would bring out his phone, but the jerks of the train make him hesitant. What if he were to drop it? What if he were to  _ drop _ it and the screen shattered to billions of shards, or it skidded beneath a seat or across the carriage or into someone’s foot? Then  _ everyone _ would know him to be careless! They would hate him! How could he live with himself, were something like that to happen?

He’s much too tired for his phone anyways. So he sits there, sure to keep himself still but for the rocking of the train, and instead contents himself with looking at those surrounding him. He likes to ascribe people characteristics in his mind when he’s bored, likes to think on the ways that they would act and speak were he not there to intercede; he ponders if they would talk while staring off into space rather than sit silent, if they would let themselves tug at their hair or rub the hem of their shirt between their fingers. 

The woman across from him bites her nails. Her head tilts this way and that, and her skin is tight around her eyes; but she looks at ease all the same and for that Akaashi envies her. Their is a father with his child two seats down and four seats across. He is pulling strange faces, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue, and she is giggling like mad. Standing in front of them is someone who looks to be exhausted, edging on thirty with a briefcase clutched in her hands so tightly that her knuckles are going white. To his right is a man, who is half-asleep, and to his left is- someone that he hasn’t seen before. 

He looks to be about Akaashi’s age, maybe older, just as tall if not taller, and Akaashi is  _ really _ very tall. His hair is black-and-white, disturbed only by the curve of his headphones, and stood straight up into spikes that poke out from all over his head like he’s stuck his finger into an electrical socket or is doing a low-budget mad scientist cosplay. The effect is strange; off-putting but not  _ bad _ , different but not  _ unpleasant.  _ Akaashi wonders for a moment how he gets it to stand so still, so immaculate. It could be natural, he supposes, and then decides that that’s stupid and that he must use a gel of some sort. And because he can’t well let the issue go now, he spends a good thirty seconds looking for the telltale stiffness, for the specific way in which light hits gelled-up hair, before he realizes that people generally don’t take kindly to curiosity like that. Generally meaning often, often meaning not at all, not at all meaning that he should probably pour his observation into something else before he makes a big, irreparable mistake.

So he looks away. And then, because he is curious, he looks back. Not at the hair this time; just at him.

His neighbor’s wearing the sort of clothing that Akaashi  _ would _ , if his insides did not roil, melt, rebel from the inside-out, and he’s wearing it with the sort of easy confidence that lets him throw his head back and keep his eyes shut as the music leaks from his headphones. He is bobbing his head lightly, tapping his foot to the beat, is sitting like he feels completely safe, and Akaashi is  _ fascinated _ . Thoroughly, wholly, from the tips of his fingers to his dull gray clothing. He is, in all of his dreary, undersaturated glory, being lent color to his cheeks and a steady beat to his heart, a flurry in his stomach and a stutter between his lungs; he feels like he does when he is nervous, like he is sparking some fuse that sets light to his whole being. Like he is funneling himself through a pulsing mass of doubt and confidence, jumping from one high to three lows and then back again until he’s all jumbled up and three seconds from bursting into tears.

From his glassy eyes to dull hair, from the nervous tip-tap of his feet on the floor and his fingers on the seat, his body is molding to the music. His face lies still but his blood hums in his veins and then those veins trill and he feels that he must have been set to measure, to rhythm, to notation. He is laid out in strips of black-and-white, hung among his more colorful counterparts in a way that bares his heart and soul; he is being ripped open, and he is being wrenched to pieces, and he is both a study in falling apart and a dissertation on being rent limb from limb.

His neighbor’s movements are becoming more erratic, more intense as the music swells to a crescendo. The headphones are white with black accents, and their cord is spiraling down and along his chest to where his phone is clasped tightly between his hands. They, too, have begun swaying with the music. And to Akaashi the sounds are tinny and small, the movements making for secondhand experience, but one that’s drawing him in with some sort of  _ pull _ , a tug or a jerk in his cold, tired way of living. He wants to know more; he wants to  _ experience  _ in such a full way that his head tilts and his fingers drum, that his enthusiasm bursts forth and flushes that inescapable dullness from his brain, that he can’t contain himself in times of joy or public spaces. He wants to know what it’s like to live unrestrained by the way his heart  _ jumps  _ and his fingers  _ twist,  _ how it would be to be able to wear bright clothing in front of unfamiliar people and listen to music (loud,  _ loud _ music) even with your eyes closed.

It’s a strange way of feeling. A longing that’s revealing the gaping chasm that tunnels right through him, from his head to his hands and along his back. He doesn’t like it, and he’s much too tired to deal with this right now. So he draws himself up into his own seat, twisting the strap of his bag between his fingers, and looks to see if there’s not anywhere else that he can sit.

There is not. There are people at his side and people at his front, people talking on cellphones or to each other, wearing everything from shorts and tank tops to three-piece suits. He is lost in a mass of limbs, fingers and toes, blurs of fabric and the murmur of voices; he is melding to the cheap covering of the plastic seat, rubber-soled shoes melting to the floor. There are no more empty seats.

From his left, the music plays on. There are drums and guitars, smooth vocals and the low thrum of a bass. Akaashi looks around to the crowded train, to the crowded carriages to both his right and left, and takes a deep, deep breath. Then he squares his shoulders and pulls in on himself until he’s narrow at his sides and sitting straight along the wall, and he makes a conscious effort to not brush against any person sitting to either side of him, but makes an  _ extra _ effort to tilt his neck and twist his waist until he’s far, far from his neighbor to the left. 

But unbidden, his eyes slide back. Over and over they rove, straining until the muscles beneath his eyelids are aching, until they hit an invisible wall and bounce to some arbitrary spot high overhead. He’s looked at the ads plastered to the roof, with their peeling edges and faded pictures, he’s looked to the solemn-faced businesswoman tapping away at her phone, and he’s looked to his own hands grasping at the sleeves of his sweatshirt. His fingers crowd into each other as the pale disks of his nails glance off his palm and knuckles, stumbling into a writhing mass. He won’t pretend this is not something that he’s felt before, the brick wall of infatuation and the split-second fuse of wonderment, but each and every time he’s caught unaware.

And he’s paying for it, he’s sure; how he must look to those around him, face blank and body vacated as he gets swept along on a wave of emotion! He feels so transparent, so worn-through by the way he’s been unbound from his hazy way of thinking, that the sunlight must be breaking through his skin and leaving his husk shining golden-brown! He is on display, mind and heart and mapped-out nerves alongside body and soul. He is paper dipped in oil.

And so it goes. And the music plays on. And Akaashi feels himself winding down, heart no longer ramming against his chest and fingers no longer wound so tightly around one another that they may break. Now he’s stuck with the dredges of emotion, the still-thrumming but now bearable fascination that’s always lingering, ready to leave him incapacitated as it pleases. And he still does his neighbor interesting, but no longer does he think that he must be teetering on the edge of the world, one foot in the vast expanse of space and the other stuck firmly in cement. He no longer feels like he's going to dissolve like salt in water. Now he just sort of wants to know what he’s listening to that could be so  _ absorbing. _

And of that- where  _ is  _ the music? It seems to have stopped, sometime during Akaashi’s monologue. Right as he was becoming genuinely curious about it too! He was ready to listen to the lyrics close enough to commit them to memory just so that he could plug them into google later! With something like indignation rising to take over what last few bits of common sense he has left, Akaashi twists his torso so he’s again sitting straight and decides that he may as well look  _ openly _ , if he is going to look. He’s been pushed here and there and back again in these past few minutes, so what would be a moment more? Uncomfortable, irritating, upsetting? Dangerous, scary, embarrassing?

So throwing caution out his window, Akaashi turns his head to look one last time, for one of those seconds that stretch to eons, and he finds that-

His neighbor has pulled his headphones to rest around his neck, and he is looking right back.

His eyes are golden-brown.

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you made it this far!! Feedback is wonderful, and I love hearing your guys’ thoughts!


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